I started playing Super Mario Galaxy on the wii on the weekend. It is interesting and odd at times adapting to the differences in genre between this and the games that I have more experience in playing.

It’s the cuteness, to be precise. I’ve played a lot of the doom/quake/half-life lineage of games, which typically start with something like grizzled marines entering an gloomy, abandoned research facility. On Mars. With flesh-rending zombies. From an alternate dimension ... called Hell. Where everything is in shades of red, brown and grey, and gameplay is punctuated by blood-curdling yells from the darkness, shotgun blasts, bullet-pockmarks and blood-slpatters.

The cute levels are cranked way up in SMG, and it's full of bright plastic flowers and bunnies and friendly, curved surfaces. I won't call it better or worse, harder or easier just because you shoot brightly coloured gems rather than RPGs.

SMG is bright, fun, mind-bendingly 3-dimensional (in space ... there's always an up and down, it just changes direction a lot), has an orchestral score and is constantly inventive. It is inventive in ways that PC shooters just aren't. New game mechanics and gimmicks are added in a steady stream. I can't call that worse or better yet, but it's certainly different. It must have made the game engine coders' lives a lot harder.

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update: I have been pointed to this quotation, which seems to fit Super Mario Galaxy:

very brightly coloured, very irridescent...deep sheens and very highly reflective surfaces. Everything is machine-like and polished, and throbbing with energy - but that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention, is the fact that this space is ... inhabited.
- Terence McKenna